Somehow I managed to do that. The current seemed just as powerful.
But suddenly I felt a strong hand grab my right wrist. I blinked and made out a shape—a merman—six or seven feet long—powerful-looking.
Again, I couldn’t hear him, but his thought was, “OK, mermaid, I’ve got you. Now swim with me. We’ll get you out of this.”
My body didn’t want to respond. I was experiencing the greatest fatigue I had ever known. But somehow I kept my tail working, and I made my way with the merman to the right bank.
“It’s a narrow channel,” he thought. “Keep hold of my hand. I’ll get you through.”
And we plunged then into the dark tunnel he had told me about, or dreamed at me.
“Flatten yourself against the wall!”
I did as he said. We passed through in a rush, going by way of this channel that the sea must have dug, bypassing the cylinder by inches. We continued, I don’t know for how long. And then, all of a sudden, we were in the ocean. I tasted salt water for the first time, coughed for a while, then became used to it.
After a while he led me up to the surface. I lay there, resting. He said, “I am Hans. The Dreamer sent me. When you have rested, I will lead you to where we live.”
All of that was a long time ago. Hans is my mate now, and we have two little mermaid girls. Hans swam here all the way from Denmark, can you imagine? Looking for a mate and a better life, and he says he’s found both with me.
Once I went down to the freezing, crushing depths where the Dreamer lives. The Dreamer is huge and slow-moving. I didn’t stay long, but he sent me friendly dreams after that.
I think the Bible was wrong. We didn’t start with the Word, but with something more powerful. Before the Word there was the Dream. Everything good and bad follows from that.
We people of the sea and air are not good fabricators. But we get things done when they are necessary to us. No, we don’t want to invade and conquer the land. That’s a fantasy on the part of the land-based humans, the large, brainy meat-eaters, who think they have something valuable to steal. We keep away from them. We keep to ourselves, in our own element, and year by year our numbers increase. We know that all life may vanish from this planet due to some unavoidable cataclysm. But we have always known that life ends.
Maybe we can get somewhere else in dreams. The Dreamer is trying to teach us.
Life ends, but the Dreaming goes on.
BEETLE
Chris was in the grip of a great flood of feeling. It was unfamiliar, but not unpleasing. Unsettling, but not unbearable. In fact, it was quite bearable. Who would not like to be in a great wave of feeling?
If you had been standing in the little thicket beside the footpath, you would have seen Chris coming. He was breathing hard, and he crashed through the bushes like a bull or some other reputedly clumsy beast. But there’s no beast so clumsy as a man in a rage.
He was walking in his bare feet. He had come from his apartment in the center of town to Johan’s house on the last lane within town limits.
He had been feeling this rage for hours. This rage, with its certainty, had propelled him to this spot on the edge of town, to the last row of houses before the hills began. To the house where Johan lived.
How had this rage begun? What marked its point of inception? What were its triggers?
At least he knew enough to not answer those questions. The feeling was its own proof of the rightness of what was going on. It was that rarest of things, a thing desirable in itself without being a stepping stone to something else.
Beneath his rage there was someone witnessing his rage and saying, “It’s about time you felt this rage. It’s right that you should feel it, because you’re being robbed of the one and only thing that gives your life any meaning. That one thing is the possession of Annabelle. She was almost yours, and then this stranger, Johan, came to town and with his charming, deceitful ways and took possession of what had been yours. He is the only thing that stands in your way—because if he were gone, Annabelle would no longer resist you. She is soft, she is an object, she wants to be possessed.
And while he listened to this voice, there in the midst of his rage, Chris knew there was something behind and beneath that voice, witnessing both his rage and the voice commenting on it. This voice wasn’t interested in the rights or wrongs of what the voice was urging Chris to do. This voice was only interested in commenting on the fact that a rage and a voice were existing.
But there was a voice behind that, commenting on how strange it was to be in this situation—at the window to Johan’s house, small hatchet in his pocket, trembling on the brink of entering and doing something he didn’t want to put into words. He didn’t want to look at the voice that told him that this feeling and the voices commenting on it were of very recent origin, they had begun minutes ago, maybe seconds.
There might also have been a cautionary voice telling him he should be careful about doing what a voice that had suddenly sprung up in his head told him he should do, especially since that involved murder, and murder was one of those things that can change your life forever, so you should think about it at least for a moment or two before doing it.
But he didn’t want to think about it! Too much time and agony, agony-tipped time, had gone into the making of the decision to kill what blocked him and then take when he wanted.
And the voices were taking his attention away from what he was doing. Right now he was opening the window into Johan’s darkened parlor. He retained enough attention to do this skillfully, silently, the way the dream had told him it should be done.
He climbed in the window and out onto the moonlit rug in Johan’s front room. He smelled the faint unmistakable trace of John, and overlaying it, the slight sweet fragrance of Annabelle. Quietly, quietly he entered the room. Only his emotions were noisy, and they didn’t make a sound to any ears but his.
He stood, balanced on the balls of his feet, and ahead of him, in the moonlight, he saw the dark shape of the staircase that led up to Johan’s sleeping room on the second floor. Without ever having been there, he knew it was a square little room, with no windows. There was a bed with a white bedspread pushed up against the wall, and there was a little night stand beside it. Funny how you could know a thing like that before you could ever know it. But this was a strange night, and a lot of things were different tonight.
He went up the stairs, entered the room, and experienced a moment of shock when he found Johan not lying in the bed, as he had imagined, but sitting in a straight-backed chair beside it.
Something about Johan was different. It took Charles a moment to figure out what it was. Then he had it. Instead of being a young fellow in his middle thirties, as he had been only the previous day, Johan was now an enormous beetle with dark bronze armor. Sitting in a chair wasn’t natural for a beetle, but Johan had managed it somehow. Johan had the triangular face of a beetle, and you might have thought that one beetle looks very much like another beetle, but that’s to a human’s eyes, whereas to a person like Charles–who was just starting to suspect he was not the person he had assumed himself to be, but something other, better, more interesting—to his eyes, Johan was fully characterized in his features, and showed up as a nice guy with a keen, intelligent face and two expressive eyes on the end of eye-stalks. And an expressive smile to his mouth slit.
“You’ve got it, don’t you?” Johan asked. “The insect perception, I mean.”
“I suppose I do,” Charles said. Somehow he had never imagined that Johan would address him in this way—from a position inside the nightmare, you could say.
Johan shifted his thorax slightly. He folded one spindly leg over another. He said, “It’s not so strange, you know. Mankind has always humanized insects, reptiles, birds, animals. Made them over in his own image. Might that not be because they are a part of him, part of his original makeup?”
“Seems possible,” Charles said, his hand gripping the handle of the hatchet under his shirt, his
eyes considering the distance between him and Johan. A distance he was slowly creeping into, slowly diminishing.
Finally, Charles said, “It’s like a hallucination, isn’t it?”
“Very much so,” Johan said. “But hallucinations are unreal, and this is real. You’re angry because I’ve stolen Annabelle, who used to be your girlfriend.”
“What do you suppose we should do about that?” Johan said, continuing to edge forward, so that the hatchet stroke would be sure.
“Why don’t we face facts. We both want her.”
“And only one can have her.”
“Wrong!” Johan cried. “That’s the proposition I beg you to look at now. We both want her, for different reasons, and at different times.”
“Where is she?” Charles asked.
“Right here, in the guest bedroom.”
Johan uncrossed his legs. “Follow me.” He walked toward the door on his many legs. Charles knew that that was the moment to strike, with Johan’s head turned away. But he put if off—this was too interesting. Anyhow, he wanted to see Annabelle.
He followed Johan down the hall and into the next room. There was an overhead light on. By its glow, Charles could see Annabelle lying on the bed. She was all bloody. She didn’t move.
“Damn you!” Charles said, and pulled out the hatchet.
“No, wait!” Johan said. And Charles wondered for a moment how many times this moment had been played out, and with what differing outcomes. He lifted the hatchet.
“This is a delicate moment,” Johan said. “But I beg you to consider what you really want of Annabelle. I have merely prepared her for you.”
Annabelle was quite dead, and there seemed to be a scum over the blood, which had already begun to dry.
“You killed her!”
“Well, yes, It’s what I wanted to do. What I was born to do. I’m not an aggressive carnivorous beetle for nothing. But consider yourself, for a moment. Look at yourself in the tall pier-glass there beside the bed.”
There is a moment before a nightmare becomes real when you can still refuse it; or think you can. And Charles was at that point now. There were many ways he could go. But he happened to look at himself in the mirror.
He saw a long gray, pulpy thing with a horny, segmented skin, a little round head, a full set of teeth, and many many tiny feet.
“Well I’ll be damned,” he said. “I’m a larva.”
“A very special larva,” Johan said. “You’re ready to sleep now with the beloved. I have done my share. My moment with her is over. Now it is your turn. You should be glad I killed her for you.”
Charles knew it was only politeness to agree. But he was caught up in another wave of feeling. This one was directed to eating, to entering the beloved. He found it natural to begin at her white abdomen, and to continue munching until he was inside.
“The townspeople will be very surprised,” Johan said. “If there are townspeople, that is.”
At the moment Charles didn’t care if there were townspeople or not. He only knew that fate had conspired to bring him to the racial dream of an insect, and here, in this red and black place, he could feel something moving in his insides. The final wonder would soon begin. He would give birth.
2004
A CONVERSATION WITH THE WEST NILE VIRUS
Great inventions sometimes come about in unorthodox ways. So it was with the first DNA computer. Jensen put down his soldering iron. “It’s ready to go.” Bailey peered at the machine on the worktable. It was a messy accumulation of motherboards, diodes, anodes, silicon chips, and, in their tiny glass cases, the all-important DNA chips. A microphone was connected, too. An endless array of multi-colored wires tied everything to everything else. If Jensen was correct, this computer would have unprecedented power and speed. Jensen was a computer maker and an itinerant genius, a middle-aged, small, sour-faced man who couldn’t hold a job at any major software company because of his unorthodox ways.
Bailey had hired Jensen, financing the work from a sizeable inheritance left him by his mother. Bailey was a tall, stoop-shouldered man in his early forties. Little spectacles perched precariously on his high forehead.
“And it’ll work?” Bailey asked.
“If the theory’s correct, it ought to. Shall we fire it up and see?”
“Not quite yet,” Bailey said. “First I need to propose a problem.”
“There’s plenty to choose from,” Jensen said. “Want to solve for world peace? See what global warning is up to? Check up on threatening asteroids?”
“They are all important,” Bailey said. “But I would like to start with something important but not crucial. And keep it our own secret until we’ve solved it.”
“You’re the money man,” Jensen said. “You got a problem in mind?”
Bailey nodded. “In three words.”
“And they are?”
“West Nile Virus.”
“That’s that Egyptian virus, isn’t it?”
“Originally detected in Uganda, in the West Nile Province. The way it works, infected mosquitoes bite humans and animals, transmitting the virus. The virus interferes with normal central nervous system functioning, multiplies, and travels to the brain where it causes inflammation and death.”
“Sounds serious,” Jensen said.
“It can and does kill,” Bailey said. “But even in a mosquito-infested area, less than one percent of mosquitoes will pick up the virus, and less than one percent of people bitten will become seriously ill. Of course, viruses mutate. It could all change. But that’s the situation at present. “
“Sounds like a pretty good test situation,” Jensen said. “I suppose you have some ideas for how talk to the virus?”
Bailey nodded. “There’s a theory that families of viruses may possess something we would call group consciousness. If that is so, we can contact this virus, talk to it through high-speed translators, maybe work something out.”
“Making a deal with a virus!” Jensen said. “This is something I have to see!”
“Me, too,” Bailey said. “I’ve got all the data here.” He held up a small aluminum briefcase. “I have a live infected mosquito. And we have your DNA translator. Let’s see how it all works together.”
“How did you get your data?”
“Evelyn, my wife, supplied me with it. She’s a researcher at the Center for Disease Control here in Atlanta. Coming up with a cure or an eradication for West Nile would do wonders for her career. It’s the best anniversary present I can think of.”
It required endless adjusting and calibrating to get the DNA computer running. The sun had dropped below the horizon and the big overhead fluorescents had come on before Jensen declared they were ready.
“I’m sure your wife will appreciate it,” Jensen said. “OK, we’re ready to begin. We have connection between you and the virus. Another first! Just talk to it. The translator should handle the exchange.”
Bailey tapped the microphone and said into it, “This is Thomas Bailey, and I’m trying to speak to what we call the West Nile Virus.”
There was a suspicious sound in the loudspeaker. Then a voice said, ” Hey, who is this?”
“I told you. I’m Tom Bailey-”
“I never heard of a virus named Tom Bailey.”
“I’m not a virus! I’m a human being!”
“So how come you can talk to me?”
“I’ve got a machine that translates what I say into your language, and vice versa.”
“That’s amazing. Not even other viruses can speak our language. Or they speak it, but with the most terrible accents. Yours is pretty good. Did you learn it in Uganda? That’s where we started out, you know.”
“I know,” Bailey said.
“Back in dear old West Nile Province. But you’ve got an accent. I’d place you as a southern West Nile province speaker. How’s your translating machine handling the thought I’m sending you by the dzaza jalgaboo?”
“Pretty well, for the mos
t part,” Bailey said. “Occasionally there’s a word or two I don’t understand, but I can usually make out the meaning.”
“Dsalih peek, we West Nile viruses often temper our speech with nonsense syllabification, gazagy boo. To put who we’re speaking with at ease, and to keep up the noise to signal ration.”
“Interesting . . . Listen, I got a favor to ask you.”
“Tell me, namgale do.”
“Well, we we’d like you to stop infecting humans. People are dying, and their wives, husbands and children resent it.”
“Humans? You mean the tall ones who stand on two appendages, except when they’re lying down, of course, presumably to sleep. We West Nile viruses don’t sleep, ourselves, but we deduced the custom from the behavior of non-viral creatures around us. You want us to quit infecting humans?”
“Yes, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
“How come you’re asking rather than demanding?” Jensen asked.
“It’s the civilized way to go,” Bailey said. “Anyhow, I don’t know what to threaten viruses with.”
“No need for anyone to threaten anyone,” the virus said. “By the way, my name is Ching. I’m a part of the universal West Nile viral mind, of course, but I also have my own individuality.”
“I hail your individuality,” Bailey said.
“And I yours,” replied Ching.
“This is the craziest thing I ever heard,” Jenson muttered to himself. “Both of these guys would fail a Turing test! Yet still, they seem to be getting somewhere.”
“Who was that?” Ching asked.
“A friend, pay no attention to him,” Bailey said.
“Anyhow, you want us West Nile viruses to leave you humans alone?”
“That’s the general idea.”
“I speak for all of us when I say I’d like to oblige you. But we need you big humans in our diet.”
“Suppose I can offer you something better than humans, or at least as good?”
“What did you have in mind?”
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